Zeus

When Paulus Emilus, Emperor of Rome, beheld the statue of Zeus Olympus which a Greek, Phidias of Athens, had erected at Olympia in ivory and gold, he trembled in all his limbs, and ordered sacrifices to be offered before the image. Twenty years later the Emperor was dead, and in a few years more the statue itself was a fable. Few men alive in the sixth century had ever seen it, fewer still could tell what had become of it. Copies exist, worn faces on coins, busts that show the softening touch of weaker epochs. Last week a new copy, perhaps the greatest of all, was discovered in Cyrene by Professor Giacomo Guildi.

The researches of Professor Guildi necessarily resembled those of a detective as much as an archaeologist. Three months ago a tourist picked up in Cyrene a fragment of an old bust and brought it to Rome; Guidi set out with his assistants, and for three months sifted the shallow loam of the old coast town for other fragments. Piece was laid to piece; the statue grew like a head emerging from the casual, apparently unrelated strokes of an artist's crayon, until at last it stood complete and the wide marble eyes, the straight nose descending under the helmet's shadow, the curling beard still dusted with thin flakes of gilt, revealed the face of the god.

Professor Guidi will take his discovery to Rome where plaster casts will be made and sent to the museums of the world.

The sculptors of the Periclean Athens, of whom Phidias was the greatest, must all be studied in copies. Roman workers, little more than capable.artisans, copied bronze in marble, marble in bronze; statues in the round were copied in relief; the size was reduced, even the proportions altered. Only two works of Phidias have been surely recognized in copies--the Athena Parthenos and the Olympian Zeus.

So perfect was the Zeus that later Greeks professed to believe that it had descended from heaven by the will of the gods. A single contemporary description exists-- that of Pausanias. "It was an image made neither of marble nor of bronze, but of gold and ivory, embellished with ebony, lacquer, and precious stones." The god, he said, held a Victory on his right hand; his left rested on a sceptre on which was perched an eagle. The throne and a footstool were elaborately carved with figures and reliefs, depicting the contests of Centaurs and Lapiths, the wars and weddings of those creatures, part god, part man, that peopled the younger earth. They swarmed at the hips of Zeus and between the legs of his throne, executed by Panaeus, nephew and assistant of Phidias. Scholars have hinted that the figure owed its fame to these entertaining adornments, but Roman writers commented on the power, at once placid and stern, a sort of deep pagan content, that lived in the head. Here was no irritable Roman Jove, waiting at the least vexation to scatter thunderbolts in all directions like sparklers, but a Grecian gentleman, portentous as a hill, poised serenely as a wave.

Phidias made his Zeus shortly after the dedication of the Parthenon in 438 B. C. His co-operation with the grandiose scheme* of Pericles for making his city more beautiful had involved him in litigation with certain private patrons and when the Olympians asked him to make a Zeus for their temple he seized the invitation as a good excuse for getting out of Athens. It is unlikely that he worked in "gold and ivory"; he was no metalsmith although he cast some of his heads in bronze; he would not have known what to do with the "lacquer and precious stones" that Pausanias talked about. He doubtless made this god, like his others, of Parian marble, or the pale veined marble from Naxos; artisans polished the stone until it resembled ivory, and added the gilt. The head discovered by Professor Guidi bears evidence of such gilding and polishing. What happened to the original? Did scavengers destroy it? Did the Romans remove it to Byzantium, and did it crumble in the fire that consumed that city in 475 A. D.? Phidias, with money enough to settle the claims against him, went back to Athens and started there his famous school of sculptors. The rest of his story is unknown.

Sculptress

The heart of the Breton glories in the past. He clings to old superstitions, continues to wear picturesque crimson and blue waistcoats, and still speaks a Celtic dialect. His emotionalism is bound up with the sea--to the north of his peninsula, he looks out on the gilded bronze statue of St. Michael standing 165 ft. above the waves on the Gothic spire of the fortress-abbey Mont St. Michel; to the south in the harbor of St. Nazaire, he now sees an American doughboy, sword in hand, eagerly poised atop the back of an eagle with graceful, outspread wings.

Nine years ago, an anxious group of these same Bretons of St. Nazaire strained their eyes toward the sea to catch the first glimpse of the liner that was bringing the vanguard of American troops to France. Last week, with French and American warships roaring salutes, with Breton peasants waving American flags, with General Pershing, Admiral Gleaves, Ambassador Herrick, and General Gouraud looking on, the canvas was lifted from Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney's* inspired masterpiece. The statue stands 300 ft. out in the harbor on a 70-ft. masonry pillar. The eagle has a tensile wingspread of 35 ft. The Bretons gazed in wonder at the power and grace of Mrs. Whitney's work.

Georges Leygues, Minister of the Navy, accepted the gift for France. He emotionally described St. Nazaire as the place where France "first felt the heart beats of the American people." At the close of his speech, he approached Mrs. Whitney and pinned the Legion of Honor on the dress of the sculptress.

Ambassador Herrick praised the genius of Mrs. Whitney and then went on to "scotch the lie" that the U. S. is becoming a greedy materialist instead of the idealist who entered the war. He finished by quoting Byron: Here's a sigh to those who love me And a smile to those who hate; And whatever sky's above me Here's a heart for every fate.

On the same day that Mrs. Whitney's art was honored by two republics, Husband Harry Payne Whitney, premier sportsman of the U. S., had a double racing triumph. His filly Pantella won the Great American and his Macaw captured the Brookdale Handicap at Aqueduct, N. Y.

Meanwhile, a delegation from marble and granite producing states, protested to Assistant Secretary of War MacNider against the use of Italian or French marble in the crosses and headstones to be placed in American cemeteries in Europe. Italian and French bids are $14.50 and $19.00 a headstone respectively, while the lowest U. S. bid is $30.95.

Dealer

King George, with Queen Mary, postponed their arrival at an important cricket match last week long enough to "open" a new wing in the big modern-and-foreign galleries at the National Gallery of Modern Art, known as the Tate Galleryš over by the Thames riverbank. There they greeted the donor of the new galleries, Sir Joseph Duveen, merchandizer of Art to U. S. and other millionaires.

Sir Joseph has, with characteristically sensational effulgence, bedizened the new galleries in green marble doorways, marble parquets, gilt ceilings, much after the fashion of his celebrated "torture rooms" deep within his fancy Fifth Avenue establishment. Of course there were paintings at Tate too--especially, 14 Sargents whose noble canvases have not become so numerous on the art-dealers' shelves as to be in need of much publicity, preceding facile disposal. A notable picture hung was that of the beheading of John, the Baptist, by Puvis de Chavannes. Degas was well represented as well as some brilliant paintings by Bancini, Daumiur, Ingres.

The munificent donor's name was bandied about last week in many a far-flung studio, for he has executed several rather unusual artistic gymnastics. In 1921 a group of gentry from Kansas City, opulent and patriotic, "backed" the local art museum in an offer to pay $500,000 for a DaVinci, "La Belle Ferroniere." Naturally a "La Belle Ferroniere" was soon forthcoming and the person who conjured it was not Sir Joseph Duveen, although he likes to be a major party in all big deals where the old masters and $500,000 are involved. The sale was about to be consummated, certificates of authenticity, vouchers, expert testimonies and all attached to the work, when Sir Joseph gave out an interview denouncing the picture as a "copy. . . . The certificates accompanying it are worthless. . . . Leonardo never copies his works."

The statement that Leonardo da Vinci never copied his own works is hard to reconcile with critics' assertions that Scotland Yard experts have declared the fingerprints on various da Vinci replicas to be identical with those on originals; that two major continental galleries-- the Louvre of Paris, the Prado in Madrid--have simultaneously exhibited a Mona Lisa. Suit for libel was entered against Sir Joseph.

In 1923 Sir Joseph was glad to receive another court summons, the complainant this time being his ancient, bitter, art-dealer enemy, Georges Demotte of Paris and Manhattan, who vainly claimed $500,000 damages for slandering a "Virgin and Child" he had recently disposed of. Shrewd Sir Joseph's loud damnation of the statue as "fake" made it impossible for Demotte to collect on the sale.

Sir Joseph, as all are aware, is descended from an English-Jewish blacksmith who expanded his farriery to an art dealer's suite. Sir Joseph, who acquired his title after birth, is le beau art of beaux arts in Manhattan. He vends excellent objects d'art undismayed before gargantuan plutocrats, penetrating their purses vastly, simply with the device of perfumed cigarettes, voluptuous oriental divans, scientific lighting, cutaway coat, and hauteur. His gift of the Tate Galleries is typical of his unselfish magnificence.

*A plan that included the four famous buildings of the Acropolis> the Parthenon, the Propylaea, the Erectheum, the Temple of the Wingless Victory.

*The former Gertrude Vanderbilt. Her other most significant sculptural works are : The Titanic Memorial at Washington, D. C., and the equestrian statue to William P. ("Buffalo Bill") Cody.

šThe Tate Gallery is the English display salon corresponding to the Luxembourg in Paris, although paintings from Tate do not "graduate" into the National Gallery of Art at Trafalgar Square as do paintings from the Luxembourg into the Louvre.